{"author":"Jess Walter","author_id":"Jess+Walter","total_quotes":29,"quotes":[{"text":"Erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.","author":"Jess Walter","tags":["america","cowboys","empires","italy"],"id":262,"author_id":"Jess+Walter"},{"text":"Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.","author":"Jess Walter","tags":["imagination","life"],"id":18057,"author_id":"Jess+Walter"},{"text":"Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway--its true religion? Wasn't the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral?...What was that but a religion?","author":"Jess Walter","tags":["movies","my-religion","truth"],"id":20919,"author_id":"Jess+Walter"},{"text":"All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell.","author":"Jess Walter","tags":["belief","life-and-living","story","telling"],"id":26890,"author_id":"Jess+Walter"},{"text":"Parenthood makes such sweet hypocrites of us all.","author":"Jess Walter","tags":["parenthood","truth-of-life"],"id":42005,"author_id":"Jess+Walter"},{"text":"He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.","author":"Jess Walter","tags":["choice","right-and-wrong"],"id":52678,"author_id":"Jess+Walter"},{"text":"Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.Sure, the world seems crazy now. But wouldn't it seem just as crazy if you were alive when they sacrificed peasants, when people were born into slavery, when they killed first-born sons, crucified priests, fed people to lions, burned them on stakes, when they intentionally gave people smallpox or syphilis, when they gassed them, burned them, dropped atomic bombs on them, when entire races tried to wipe other races off the planet? Yes, we've ruined the planet and melted the ice caps and depleted the ozone, and we're always finding new ways to kill one another. Yeah, we're getting cancer at an alarming rate and suicides are at an all-time high, and, sure, we've got people so depressed they take a drug that could turn them into pasty-skinned animals who go around all night dancing and having sex and eating stray cats and small dogs and squirrels and mice and very, very rarely- the statistics say you're more likely to be killed by lightning- a person.But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It's always the Apocalypse. The world hasn't gone to shit. The world is shit.All I'd asked was that it be better managed.","author":"Jess Walter","tags":["apocalypse","dystopia","end-of-the-world"],"id":60849,"author_id":"Jess+Walter"},{"text":"Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. Your take is what counts.","author":"Jess Walter","tags":["ideas"],"id":74797,"author_id":"Jess+Walter"},{"text":"I don't know what I expected – no maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface- but this drug dealer is more like Al Pacino at the beginning of The Godfather reasonably bemused, untouched by his criminal world, sitting with Diane Keaton whispering about Luca Brazzi, not yet asleep with the fishes, or like Al Pacino from Glengarry Glen Ross, although actually, now that I think about it, he's not like Al Pacino at all but more like Kevin Spacey from that film, and who's ever been afraid of Kevin Spacey?","author":"Jess Walter","tags":["al-pacino","drugs","godfather","humor","kevin-spacey","scarface"],"id":88801,"author_id":"Jess+Walter"},{"text":"We live in a world of banal miracles.","author":"Jess Walter","tags":["reality"],"id":138899,"author_id":"Jess+Walter"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":29,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}